History ThatOneLevel / MMORPG

* How are the Promyvions not mentioned? The dungeons may look pretty and have soothing music, but they are the very definition of hell. All of the mobs have true sight and are later on difficult enough to wipe out your party in minutes, especially the spider/strider that spawns from the deepest depths of hell, and all of the mobs are packed together. You have to do some tricky maneuvering to get around them sometimes, and if you attract one's attention (or more than one, more than likely), you're going to have to take one for the team and hope you die away from the path of the mob so you can safely reraise. You only have a prayer if you have a group of people you normally work with, or you managed to round up a rag tag group of competent party members. As for the dungeon layout itself, there are only a few levels to work your way through, but past floor one, there are several different places where the exit to the next level could be located. When you were lucky enough to find said exit, you had to beat up a mini-boss that spawns GoddamnBats and does throw-back AoE damage. Then there are the actual bosses at the end of the journey through hell. Fuck up, and you get to do this ALL OVER AGAIN. And this is only the BEGINNING of the incredibly long set of missions that will have you smashing your head through your monitor.

*** Correction.....as far as the story is concerned Operation: Gnomeregan fails. Granted the gnomes do manage to reclaim the surface areas and use that as a new starting area. However the instance itself will remain intact to menace a new generation of WoW players who will no doubt be starting in Cataclysm.

** And that's just the first half of the instance. The second half is a "gauntlet"-style battle where you have to fight off {{Mooks}} while Jaina/Sylvanas (depending on faction) breaks down ice walls in your path and Arthas acts as an AdvancingBossOfDoom who will instantly wipe the party if he catches up with you--a fate that's guarenteed if you have poor dps, poor group coordination, or anyone dies. Finding a PUG that can either part of this dungeon effectively, let alone both, is often more trouble than it's worth.

* ''City of Heroes'' also has a Scrappy Tileset, if you can believe that. The tileset for randomly generated cave missions has a penchant for putting the mission objective in a specific universally loathed 5-story-tall room with ample places to lose track of enemy NPCs. This wouldn't be so bad, except that one often needs to wipe out the enemies in the same room as the mission objective, for "Defeat <insert Boss name> and his Guards" and "Get the MacGuffin" missions alike.

* Plane of Sky, the third of the three original planes. To even enter the Plane of Sky required a wizard to teleport each group individually, which consumed a very expensive reagent with each cast. To introduce you to the level of obnoxious difficulty you were about to encounter, all buffs were stripped upon entering the plane. All the boss mobs would disappear if not killed within 80 minutes of spawning them, and each was required to progress to the next island. However, if you went too quickly, Sirran (your 'guide', for lack of a better term) would not respawn correctly and you could also get stuck and fail that way. Conversing with Sirran could also break the progression or cause him to kill you. Area effect spells on the first island would aggro a room full of NPCs from an island below. Some islands had instant aggro the moment you arrived; others had wildly pathing mobs; others had mobs that split when you killed them; the difficulty of all mobs started at very hard and got worse from there. On the 8th and final island, the boss "The Eye of Veeshan" had a Death Touch capability, which meant he called a player's name every 30 seconds and they dropped dead. To top it all off, all the island bosses were on a 7-day respawn timer, so if you failed to make it to the top you had to wait a full week before being able to try again.

** [[YourMileageMayVary Really? This troper hasn't died on the third phase yet, and cleared it less than a week after it was released. I consider the achievement for not letting Brann get hurt to be the easiest dungeon achievement to get.]]

*** Basically, sleepers [[{{TheAIIsACheatingBastard}} just cheat]] to be so hard. They can insta-lock. Their resists are incredibly high. Drones are useless since the AI blows those up first. They're immune to most EWAR. The range on their webs/scrams/EWAR is significantly greater then what player modules can provide. Their Energy Neutralizers are more powerful then possible. Bringing Capital ships spawns even more of them.

*** ItGetsWorse in Factions. Several levels that are just like this appear very early in the game, leading to Factions's rather nasty reputation as being either "very unforgiving" or "A newbie trap". You can get to the level cap before the third mission. WOW. Great! NotSoFast though...many people have had to retry vizunah square numerous times because either the other side was incompetent, they had no idea what to expect, or a GameBreakingBug would make the mission unwinnable. And this is only the third mission...the ''fourth'' mission is about killing four bosses. But every time you kill one boss, additional enemies appear until you are nearly swarmed. Then the ''fifth'' mission puts you under a time limit against an insane amount of mobs and several enemies can kill you if you don't know what to do. It evens out for a little while much to the sigh of relief, but don't think you're in the clear yet...the difficulty spikes again when you reach Unwaking waters and if you aren't fast enough to stop the corrupted dragon scales, 10 arrows of health degeneration. OUCH. After that, another mission to get to the emperor where once again, you are under a time limit and have to pick people to go with you that can skip a part of the level. Not everybody knows to take Talon Silverwing and either Cynn or Danikah (Most prefer Cynn), almost making it a bit of a GuideDangIt. But don't worry...the final boss is actually quite easy.

*** The Weh No Su mission can get several players to be annoyed. You have to kill four megabosses, and with each boss dead, more mobs spawn until you're swarmed by the final boss.

* Better question, how is the airship mission not mentioned? This mission before being nerfed required several hundred thousand gil (the equivilant of several DOZEN hours of gil farming) and even to this day requires a few dozen thousand per person. To say nothing of the fact that if your setup is not absolutely perfect with exactly the right classes you are nearly garunteed to fail before you've even begun. There was nothing quite like killing the omega weapon only to run out of liquids with the ultima weapon at less than 50% and wipe. There are several people on every server who have literally done this mission dozens of times and spent millions of gil without a single successful attempt. It's that bad.

* ''Runescape'' possesses one of these in the form of the quest "Ratcatchers" Namely, around half-way in the quest where you must do a forced stealth mission in order to kill some rats with your cat, however, this part of the quest suffers from heavily bugged AI. Meaning guards will often spot you behind walls, when they're not facing you and often walking out of their patrol routes into places where they are completely unavoidable. Thankfully, a recent fix has made this quest less fustrating, but god help you if you're doing this quest with only a kitten, as you wills spend hours watching your chatbox filling up with "Your kitten fails to catch the rat".
** While frustrating, that doesn't have the straight up difficulty of some other parts of the game. The quest Nomad's Requiem requires you to kill a level 699 boss. He has one attack that will do 750 damage (and your max health is 990) unless you avoid it, makes copies of himself that hit way too high, and another attack that will kill you unless you're at or above full health. Combine this with attacks in between that regularly hit 200+ , and you have a boss that few have killed in less than 5 tries (took me 6) and that some have taken 20+ attempts to kill.

** What about Mourning's End part II. The quest revolves around solving several light puzzles inside of a massive underground temple called none other than the Temple of Light. While this would be a fair challenge on it's own, the temple is packed with Shadows that are always aggressive and frequently deal up to 130 damage. Worse still is there's also a section where you must use your agility to crawl across wall supports to reach more pieces of the puzzle. Even at 65 Agility, you'll still fail dozens of times, causing you to fall to the floor below.

* Scholomance. Neverending, too much mobs, bosses that were a little too hard to figure out or hit too damn hard...No wonder everyone hated it!

* Halls of Reflection is another. To even get there, you need to do the Forge of Souls and Pit of Saron. Enemies come at you in waves, and except for a continue point halfway through, you have to start over if you wipe. Groups often break up at the first wipe, making it almost impossible to progress.

** Again, really? My server at least usually does it just fine, unless the healer sucks.

* The Perez Park zone is also a horror at low levels. Most of the zone consists of a huge, dark, confusing maze filled with large groups of enemies that are impossible to avoid. Even players with higher-level characters hate being sent back there due to the difficulty of navigating around it. Flight and Super Jump don't help due to the dense canopy of trees that forms a roof over the whole of the maze.
* It's interesting to note that the developers have been learning from their mistakes: the most-maligned zones tend to be those that have gone longest without an overhaul. Faultline and the Rikti Crash Site (now the Rikti War Zone) were all but ignored by the players until they recently got complete overhauls. Faultline especially was loathed for the deep canyons that were easy to fall into and hard to get out of without flight. Boomtown, Dark Astoria, and Eden also seem to lack any sort of player presence at all, however, this is less because they are Scrappy Levels and more because there's almost nothing to do in those zones (a problem that also plagues Perez Park).
** Many of these zones are part of a now-abandoned design philosophy from much earlier in the games history: they're Hazard Zones, regions of the city that were devastated by one or another catastrophe and essentially evacuated and abandoned. As such, they contain neither contacts to give quests or innocent civilians to rescue, only swarms of villains and monsters usually in groups too large for a single player to tackle alone. The only reason to ever go there is by being sent from another mission elsewhere, and then you try to run to the target as fast as possible. It's a shame, because some of these zones have quite interesting stories as to how they got so bad, but the stories aren't explored noone lives there anymore.

** The worst AE Combination has to be the dreaded "Defeat All + Outdoor Map + Arbitrary Goal + Patrols (That Spawn After Said Arbitrary Goal)", otherwise known as a "Farm" Mission. If you're just doing random missions and you get one of these, it's best to just drop it...

*** Correction.....as far as the story is concerned Operation: Gnomeregan fails. Granted the gnomes do manage to reclaim the surface areas and use that as a new starting area. However the instance itself will remain intact the menace a new generation for WoW players who will no doubt be starting in Cataclysm.

** It's recently been announced that one of the biggest events of the Cataclysm expansion will be OPERATION: GNOMERAGAN where the gnomes will finally reclaim it and you will even get to use it as a base after the conquest. ThrowTheDogABone indeed.